The Secret Agent (2025) review

Don't be misled by the title, this gentleman is not exactly Jason Bourne: researcher/professor Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura), whose wife passed away and has a son named Fernando (Enzo Nunes), drives to the city of Recife and hangs around Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) as well as several fellow dissidents, but quickly finds himself pursued by assassins hired by Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), the head of electric company Eletrobras, because the two of them have an unpleasant history together.  It's set in Brazil during the late 1970's - when Jaws and The Omen were wildly popular at the box office - and the period detail is sharp (it feels stained by cigarette smoke and sweat) although the narrative itself is diced up into pieces and lacks cohesion so that scenes rarely 'flow' into each other ... and sometimes it cuts to the "present day" with Flavia (Laura Lufési) looking up information on her laptop.  Moura won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, yet the movie's so easily distracted with all of its flagrant symbolism and "fanciful asides" his character gets lost in the morass; Mendonça Filho claims it took him three years to finish the screenplay, but maybe he could have taken more time to hone it and make its political statement have a sharper edge instead of the giant sigh that it is.